Iranians Pull On Their Blue Jeans, Mocking Netanyahu

A flood of sarcastic tweets greets Netanyahu's comment that if Iranians were free, they could don denim and listen to rock.

By Kochava Rozenbaum

First Publish: 10/7/2013, 4:27 PM

Netanyahu on BBC Persian

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The day that Iranians can freely wear their blue jeans has come.

Dozens of young Iranians posted pictures of themselves modeling their pairs of jeans on Twitter, sarcastically denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for his comments on the Persian-language BBC channel, in which Netanyahu said: "I think if the Iranian people had freedom, they would wear jeans, listen to Western music, and have free elections."

Despite the fact that Twitter is banned in Iran, many Iranians& hacked through a government firewall for the opportunity to berate Netanyahu for supposedly not knowing that "Iran's teens wear jeans & listen to western music."

"He doesn't know we wear jeans, how can he know that Iran is developing nuclear weapons?," were among some of the tweets.

Another post was of a photo of a store which sells jeans and captioned: "Mr. Netanyahu, here's a shop for weapons of mass destruction."

While the photos kept on flooding Twitter, Netanyahu's prerecorded interview with CBS network aired. In the interview, he charged Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of speaking "sugar talk" to the media.

"Rouhani is tweeting here, but he doesn't allow the Iranian people to tweet over there in Iran. He's saying all these nice things about Iranian democracy. They are executing people by the hundreds, jailing them by the thousands, any dissident. I mean, that's double talk," said Netanyahu and added, "This is not what the Persian people deserve."

When addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Netanyahu warned that Rouhani is a "wolf in sheep's clothing" dead set on advancing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program despite overtures to the contrary.

"I would welcome a genuine rapprochement, a genuine effort to stop the nuclear program – not a fake one. Not 'harfe pooch'," Netanyahu said, which can be roughly translated as "empty words" or “nonsense."